There’s a cupcake on your Chrome, and you can’t do a dang thing about it

If you’re using the Windows version of Google’s Chrome Web browser, you may have noticed something a little odd in the last week. A small cupcake may have replaced the usual Chrome logo you’re used to seeing appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the program.

Huh? How did that get there? If you’re seeing it, you know you didn’t put it there. And if you’ve poked around at all, you may have discovered you can’t get rid of it.

Could be an unintentional theme installation? Despite its famously minimal nature, Chrome has long had the ability to sport a customized look. Did you install a theme by mistake?

Nope.

Is it spyware or a virus? Is this some cyberscum’s idea of a joke? Is your Windows PC infected?

Not at all.

If you’re seeing the cupcake, it means you’re using one of the very early testing versions of Chrome for Windows. Google offers four different “channels” for its browser: stable, beta, developer and canary. If you download and install anyone one of those channels, you’ll get auto-updates when a new release is available for each one. Chrome updates are “silent” – you don’t get a warning when a new version is installed. Thus, new features can appear without notice.

Developer and canary (as in “canary in the coalmine”) are the earliest, pre-beta builds of Chrome, and that’s where Google tests cutting-edge features. And what you’re seeing with the cupcake icon is a feature that’s still being built out, but hasn’t been completed yet.

According tothis Google Help Forum discussion, Chrome’s developers are adding the ability to have multiple profiles in Chrome. The cupcake icon would be one of several you could choose to indicate which profile is active. If you click on the icon now, you’ll see several other choices.

One choice you don’t see, sadly, is the original Chrome icon. You also don’t see the ability to turn the feature off completely.

Here’s how a Google engineer describes what’s going on, and what should happen once the feature is finished:

- What you’re seeing is still a work-in-progress. The feature is still in development.

- If you only have 1 default profile, you won’t be forced to use an icon soon. The icon is there right now to provide a way to control profiles until we complete implementation of Profile settings in the Options page (see http://crbug.com/88878). We’ll be removing it once it’s complete.

- Icons right now are early stage drafts.

The problem is, however, that one of the things not implemented is the ability to disable the feature. That’s caused some people to experiment with ways to get rid of the cupcake icon, including clicking the “Delete profile…” menu item in the illustration above.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t get rid of the icon. Rather, it deletes all your bookmarks.

From the Help Forum:

OK, what I think you Google folk aren’t getting is that a) suddenly we had a cupcake (again, horrible choice for the default) b) click on the cupcake showed a little box that said *something* about profiles. c) in a desire to get rid of the unwanted cupcake (have I mentioned what a dumb choice that was for the default?), user clicks on “delete profile”. d) poof! bookmarks gone.A good UI needs to be discoverable and most importantly, do no harm. Pretty much a fail on both parts there …

While the canary and developer builds are clearly a platform for experimentation, and you should expect to see features in-progress and not working correctly, Google has clearly pulled the trigger too early here. It should have included an OFF button before it plugged the unfinished feature into place.

Those who are on the stable and beta channels needn’t worry. The feature won’t show up in those versions until it’s much farther along.

If you’re a Chrome user who can’t stand the cupcake, though, your best bet for now is to switch to the beta channel. Or, you can be patient and wait. The early-release channels update quickly. The ability to remove the the cupcake should be available soon.

Update:@drapps on Twitter notes that, in the latest canary build of Chrome, the icons have been changed and the default is now “an ’80s-esque head silhouette”.

Unfortunately, there’s still no ability to revert to the original Chrome icon or turn the feature off completely.

I’ve got my eye on that pizza icon once these changes make it to the developer version.